Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin was a collaborative writing project that explored the possibilities of contemporary critical, theoretical and art writing in the context of the New Life Berlin Festival (31st May – 15th June 2008).
The three main themes of the New Life Berlin festival were: Transnational Communities, Artistic Social Responsibility and Participation and Intervention. And Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin matched the structure, themes and artistic content of the festival itself: it was curated but participatory at its core, and it involved on and offline communities in examining artistic responsibility and new modes of existing for art critics. Within this model, the purpose of the programme was four fold; 1) to provide written (online and printed) critique and documentation of the festival, 2) to examine the notion of community, 3) to explore the role of criticism in relation to participatory art and 4) to act as professional development programme for new and existing international critical writers.
This blog includes all the texts that were written by the 21 international writers on the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin programme, three of whom experienced the festival online from across Europe and the US. Combined, their output represents 5 interviews, 3 previews, 27 reviews and 15 opinion pieces relating to the socially engaged and collaborative art work at the festival and the practice of critical
writing. There were also two printed publications produced as part of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. The PDF’s of these publications can be emailed to you on request to opendialogues@gmail.com.
Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin programme:
31 May, 10.30am – 5.30pm Writers’ Workshop
2 June, 2.30pm – 5.30pm Writers’ Meeting
5 June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique
7 June, 5pm – 7pm Live Review
7 June, Publication of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin ‘issue 1’
12 June, 5pm – 7pm Peer Critique
14 June, Publication of Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin ‘issue 2’
15 June, 11am - 1pm Plenary Session
7 June Open Dialogues: Live Review
The Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Live Review was a showcase of, evaluation for and live critical response to Open Dialogues and New Life Berlin. Special guests included:
• Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Neilsen (Wooloo Productions)
• Doreen Mende (General Public, Berlin)
• Tatjana Fell and Lisa Glauer (Arttransponder, Berlin)
• Anonymous Representative (30 Days in New Life Berlin)
The Writers
The writers on Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin were Anga'aefonu Bain-Vete, Alfredo Cramerotti, Clare Carswell, Alexandria Clark, Mary Kate Connolly, Kathryn Fischer, Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Christina Irrgang, Joanna Loveday, Cheree Mack, Matthew MacKisack, Carali McCall, Charlotte Morgan, Christin Niehoff, Ann Rapstoff, Valerie Palmer, Carrie Paterson, Kara Rooney, Heiko Schmid, Claire Louise Staunton and Eliza Tan. More details about the writers can be found on the CV section of http://www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/
Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin was facilitated by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, the directors of Open Dialogues, with assistance from Christina Irrgang (Open Dialogues Associate, Berlin).
Please only reproduce articles from this blog with permission from the author and Open Dialogues.
http://www.opendialogues.com
http://www.open-dialogues.blogspot
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THURSDAY - JUNE 26, 2008 - 03:06:38 AM
ART AND COMMUNICATION: ON THE POSSIBILITIES NEW LIFE BERLIN OFFERED TO REFLECT ON ART
At least there’s one thing which will stay in everybody’s mind: these huge white letters on silver ground. CALL ALL ARTISTS they shout – from an oversized billboard at Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, from posters in the inner city, from all these flyers which were handed out in advance and during the New Life Berlin festival. There’s no doubt; the advertisement for the festival was overwhelming, but what about the communication of the art itself?
FIRSTLY: Gaining information on the artist’s work
An interview between Joanna Loveday and one of the artistic co-directors of Wooloo Productions – Sixten Kai Nielsen – points out that the individual projects of New Life Berlin have to show themselves during the festival. In regard to „Live Art“ and the nature of ongoing art projects, I understand that projects need to develop during the exhibition. Following the New Life Berlin slogan „participation and intervention“ these projects set their focus on actual interaction with the local public: over the festival’s duration they emerged both by means of civic engagement and through direct artistic intervention. But I wonder: who showed these individuals, namely the artists, to the audience, before the projects began?
Sometimes, over the course of New Life Berlin, I wished that there could have been more information on the artists in advance. As both Open Dialogues Associate and a writer with Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin, a critical writing project that aimed to investigate relationships between artists, writers and audience, I found that more information on the artists’ work in general would have helped to understand the participatory aspects of the projects.
Although the festival was announced as an ongoing process there was no need to conceal what its artists have already done, what they are going to do, what they are intending to do. For me, this kind of information was not all obvious from the Wooloo site. Just as people are keen to find clear information about everything they are confronted with – especially in the case of ‚art in motion’ – people like to understand artists’ intentions and their background. Moving on from the festival’s mission statement „Call all artists“ I ask: who were these artists and what was their art in New Life Berlin about?
SECONDLY: Talking about art during the exhibition
As part of NLB, there was an enterprise called „Arts and Conversation“ which suggested it would clarify this confusion. Yes, it supplied three presentations of art. But while „Arts and Conversation“ showcased a variety of artists, it did not supply any conversation on art as a whole.
For instance: What happened during the „Arts and Conversation“/„Hack.fem.East“ meeting was a virtual tour through the exhibition which was on show in Kunstraum Kreuzberg. All this occured not in front of the artpieces themselves, as one would imagine. It was more like a walk on a monopoly-board, in which the curators stamped across a floor plan of the exhibition, painted on the ground in one of the rooms of the artspace.
It was also remarkable that there was no ‚chair’ in any of these meetings, although the project itself was curated – maybe nobody recognized Katharina Valida Buch, who organised these three artist-talks. It would have been welcome if just anybody acted as the moderator of these meetings. Instead: Silence. Confusion. One of the other Open Dialogues writers suggested that the audience could have been pulled into a more lively discussion if there had been a moderator engaging directly with the main speaker. Sure, the specific art was represented well, for instance when the artist Mariana Viegas spoke, the audience got to know a lot about her photographic practice. But without any moderator or curator for „Arts and Conversation“, it was difficult to break through its monolithic presentations. The audience felt obligated to get a discussion going, and in the end each event was not about the subject “art and conversation” as expected, but a monologue from artists who represented their work on their own. What we, the audience, wanted was a more general debate on the subject ‚art and conversation’ in terms of ‚communication on art’, within art. We needed a ‚leader’ to take us through some discussions on contemporary art, who could have explained the general artistic premise of the festival to the audience, and then the specific artwork. There was a real requirement for the conveyance of an idea about the festival itself.
CONCLUSION: Criticality as response to the art which is shown
As art criticism comes at the end, conclusion was the task for Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin. Indeed, Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin regarded this task as a serious quest for meaning. The aim was to create a debate on those contemporary artistic interventions shown at the festival. But even for an operation like Open Dialogues, which specializes in writing about art that is live or participatory, gaining access to information about the art at New Life Berlin proved to be an onerous task.
By summing up the last two weeks on the blog, which is rich in content, it appears obvious that Open Dialogues completed the festival as a whole. The critics engaged with the festival not only through their writings, but also as members of the audience, as Clare Carswell already mentioned in her article on „Old Berliners, New Berliners“. To be writer as well as audience is no easy task. For this reason, the question of whether invited criticism can still be critical might appear again. But whilst you’re reading this – it might also have been answered on it’s own.
IN THE MEANTIME, AND IN THE END: The Open Dialogues Blog
For a certain time you will find all the infomation on the artprojects shown at New Life Berlin Festival on www.wooloo.org/opendialoguesblog/. For the moment this is the only source that provides you – the (virtual) observer – with content on the festival. This is not only a call to all artists, this is a call to everyone who wants to find out what New Life Berlin was about.
What New Life Berlin finally offered the audience in terms of reflection on the festival, is the outcome of the opinions of a variety of critics. But this collection of opinions does not allow the viewer of the blog to find out in retrospect what happend in reality. So far there are no other forms of textual documentation for any of these art projects on the Wooloo site. Instead you now have to trust the conclusions Open Dialogues provides: Open Dialogues’ contributions are the only testimony that remains of the efforts of New Life Berlin’s participatory art.
There’s one thing I recognized in my experience over the last two weeks and whilst thinking, reflecting and writing on all this: art is like love – it is never possible without communication.
Christina Irrgang
Christina Irrgang is the Open Dialogues: New Life Berlin Associate and studies Theory of Art and Aesthetics at the State University of Media, Arts and Design in Karlsruhe/G and works as a freelance art critic. Contact: irrgang@iwprojekte.de www.iwprojekte.de
Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com
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THURSDAY - JUNE 26, 2008 - 03:03:28 AM
WHEN IS AN ARTIST NOT AN ARTIST?
30 Days
Two anonymous cartographers
30 days prior to the closing of the New Life Berlin festival.
The two cartographers behind the 30 Days project casually make their way across a courtyard, between two flat roofed buildings and back towards the main road. Over the disused railway track opposite, they were told by the previous gallery’s assistant, a row of small art spaces inhabit the glass-fronted elevation of another vast converted industrial building. Shadowing them, I enjoy this sense of discovery and the unknown route ahead - a process invariably more interesting than much of the work on show.
Photographs and notes are taken upon entering the galleries, which are assessed according to a scale known only to the cartographers. Acting as anonymous practitioners, these cartographers aim to infiltrate and subvert Berlin’s local art networks and create, over thirty days, an alternative map of the city’s artistic landscape, which can then be used and added to by future visitors. Both cartographers originate from the USA, and through their position as relative outsiders, they also aim to connect organisations by pairing up the mapped spaces and encouraging them to collaborate on a future project. These pairs would not normally work together – perhaps because of preconceptions about each other’s work, different commercial agendas, or lack of inclination to direct resources towards small, experimental projects. The results of the cartographers' activities are one Google map of locations and two collections of textual or image based information that exist online via Wooloo.org. The resulting institutional collaborations will be followed up by the cartographers at a later date.
The cartographers admit that their categorisation of the galleries is subjective, and explain that any map-maker’s cultural background influences the maps that they produce. Talking to these map makers, it is clear that they are highly educated art practitioners who have de-classified themselves as artists in favour of the title ‘cartographer’. However, they say they aim to tread lightly over their chosen terrain, creating altered perspectives and relations amongst its potential visitors or inhabitants, whilst maintaining a critical distance and leaving no trace of their presence. Referring to the project in cartographic terms is therefore problematic because, by nature, the traditional cartographer stamps their ground a little, forming a subjective overview of place that is open to misinterpretation or generalisation. Cartography produces space, defining identities through difference. The inhabitants of the landscape being mapped (in this case, artists/professionals/galleries) then locate themselves within these identities, by which they define the outsider. Therefore, if the 30 Days online site and maps are to gain the level of interest and visibility that their creators aim for, the cartographers have the potential to mark their influence on the identity and boundaries of the Berlin art scene.
Another subjective element of this project is the classification of artistic activity. When do we cease to define activity as artistic - when working artists lose physical proximity to each other? When they all go out for a coffee? Perhaps the cartographers are being knowingly playful with the elusive nature of the artistic act, but if so, this could be reflected more in their results. In fact, the map shows established galleries for the most part and a lack of artist-led initiatives, studio groups, temporary spaces, events or individual artists’ activities. This is probably because less formal additions would be harder to fix geographically, which would interfere with the easy use of the maps as guides.
But the maps’ status as guides is also in doubt. In order to dispel the fixedness of the cartographers’ definitions, it is crucial that the maps can be adjusted by future visitors. Therefore, the project’s priority must be to provide a model for visitor re-structructuring (by adapting the original results online or creating a new map), rather than to create a definitive guide. However, the maps need to be visually clear and accessible to enable visitors to contribute. Although one of these maps is available through Google search, most of the information is stored on Wooloo.org with no direct link from the homepage (though this may be out of the cartographers' hands), and it is also unclear how the maps could be adapted. The mapped spaces are presented through an inviting visual display, yet remain separate and difficult to understand in relation to one another. Without clear links given between them, they are rendered isolated, cut off from the flow of movement in-between which defines them as destinations.
On a practical level, the artists claim that adopting the title of cartographer allows them more freedom to work within the networks they are navigating, which suggests the art institutions they visit may treat artists using ’non-art’ processes more suspiciously than their professional counterparts. Perhaps as artists have historically taken the institutional framework of their working environment as subject for analysis, they seem likely to have a more complex critical agenda, and as they don’t represent the views of a corporate employer, artists are allowed a more critical position than other professionals. The re-positioning of roles also denies any distinction between the artists' work and that of other practitioners and professionals in whose fields they may be working; when acting as artists, the cartographic process may be seen as a tool in the realisation of an artistic idea, but when acting as cartographers, the emphasis shifts to the product of their activities – the map itself. This role play also enables potential audiences to engage with the maps outside of an artistic context, which, the cartographers assume, would only complicate the situation. By enforcing the cartographic status of the project, its members make sure that the map readers are simply reading maps, and not partaking in a work of art.
This cloaking of the artist has implications within the network of relations existing between artists, art institutions, audiences and publics. As the New Life Berlin festival has exemplified, many artists position themselves in diverse roles, employing processes traditionally associated with other areas of study or professional work. Shouldn’t the artist’s role be declared in order to promote contemporary art practice as multi-faceted and inter-disciplinary? In fact, New Life Berlin was structured to promote just this kind of interdisciplinarity, among its communities of artists and participants. Also, though the artists have masked the project’s status as a work of art, the project is dependent on the artistic context of this festival for its promotion and dissemination, and so 30 Days’ separation from the art world is only fleeting.
Perhaps then, alternatively, the cartographers’ choice not to be deemed artists within the festival’s publicity material offers a critique of some participatory and interactive projects, whose claims of shifting and merging the roles of the artist and audience are unfounded. In denying the role of the artist the cartographers suggest that, as artists, the distinctions will always remain.
For now the project stands on ambiguous ground. Much like the dried out areas of land that interrupt the sprawl of Berlin’s urban system, the maps’ function is unclear. They are available for use, yet the user has an uncertain amount of freedom within them and relies on mediation for access. When the festival ends, and the cartographers remove themselves from the physical location of Berlin, the map they are offering will show its full subversive potential.
Charlotte A. Morgan
Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com
Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com
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WEDNESDAY - JUNE 25, 2008 - 01:21:22 PM
THREE GIRLS IN A TENT
SANDWICH BOX AND BASENORTH AT THE NEW LIFE BERLIN FESTIVAL
The Sandwich Box is a metal carry box that contains a small gazebo tent for artists to erect and use as they wish in order to generate an art outcome. It has travelled widely and been used by artists all over the world as part of a collaborative art project of the same name that was started in Denmark in 2004. At its latest outing, the Sandwich Box gazebo was put up in Berlin as part of the New Life Berlin Festival by a staunch and amiable group of three young UK artists calling themselves BaseNorth. They are Sarah Stamp, Nicola Smith and Anna Puhakka. They graduated in Fine Art in 2007 from the University f Sunderland in the North East of England and now work in collaboration whilst getting their own individual art practices up and running.
Determined not to be stopped in their creative tracks by the lack of a studio after they were evicted from their Sunniside studio by property developers, BaseNorth are seeking ways of addressing the dilemma of how and where to make art in the early years after studentship when the funded space of the academic institution has gone. Resolute in their intention to make the best of things, they are proactive in promoting their work, making contacts and at the same time trying to raise awareness to the basic need of artists, like any artisans, to have somewhere to go do their work.
This then, is a good match. BaseNorth, young artists with artistic development on their mind and Wooloo Productions, the ambitious New Life Berlin hosts, cutting their teeth on festival organization and wanting to support emerging artists. Both collaborations are burning with social and artistic issues reflecting real life cultural mobility in a participatory art context in Berlin; a city that of all in Europe right now, embodies urban regeneration.
The remodelling that is going on culturally, economically and architecturally in Berlin seems to be a positive draw for artists from all over the world to come to live, work and just be here in this nascent era. A lack of affordable studio space is not the usual experience in Berlin where large dilapidated industrial spaces are waiting to be reclaimed and used by artists everywhere. Did BaseNorth know this? In Britain certainly it is a different landscape wherein artists have to beg, borrow or steal to find affordable studio space, and BaseNorth are here to tell us that. This is the point of them being here in Berlin. Whilst deciding what shape their individual professional practice will take, they will bang the drum on behalf of those of us back home who are being squeezed out of existence by the mammoth that is urban regeneration.
BaseNorth erected their Sandwich Box gazebo, which they chose to define as a ‘free mobile studio’, in the blazing sun one morning on the grass parkland area outside the Volksbuhne theatre in the centre of Berlin. Then they sat in it and waited for people to come and visit them. If you did get down on hands and knees and crawl into the tent with them you found them pink and hot, chatty and cheerful amongst a clutter of drinks cartons and snacks, crayons and sewing kits, paper balls and other remnants of sporadic art production. They described their turn at the Sandwich Box project as BaseNorth International Open Studio and in keeping with most open studios, it involved a lot of sitting, eating and talking. This was art on the move, unrefined and unfinished and gathering moss as it rolled - just what the New Life Berlin festival wants to see going on.
BaseNorth had a lot to say and were keen to explain their reasons for wanting to take part in the Sandwich Box project and then to bring it into the context of the New Life Berlin Festival. BaseNorth International Open Studio involves more than just the Sandwhich Box and the free mobile studio- there is also a postcard that they produced at a tourist gimmick machine here in Berlin. It has their temporary studio centre stage amongst the Berlin sights. The postcard has been posted to the folks back home, including to the property developers who brought BaseNorth’s Berlin project about. So far only a small number of the postcards have been made. Despite some research funding to come here BaseNorth didn’t have the euros to produce anywhere near enough of the art object part of their Sandwhich Box outcome. Such is the way of art making for most and BaseNorth seem knowing enough to do what has to be done in order to realise their ideas. Their postcard will function as publicity and fundraising tool as well as art agitprop. BaseNorth International Open Studio is a decisive and progressive outcome, one with real functionality and an eye to the future, despite its rather fleeting presence in Berlin.
BaseNorth International Open Studio prompted those of us who did engage with it to consider the impact of life on art and its production. How the sometimes unseen forces of culture and economy shape the way artists define themselves and what they make, and what strategies they develop in order to protect and nurture their practice. BaseNorth’s outcome did meet their intention and will have an impact in terms of continuing to give visibility to this important UK issue. ‘Thanks for that’ I say, for I too am in the process of having to leave my studio because of tough economic decisions by the landlord.
It would have been good to see Sandwich Box, BaseNorth International Open Studio and this energetic collaboration at work for longer than half a day. It would have been good to see more audience connect with it, with them. I was one of the Open Dialogues writers who called by to visit them on their only open morning. There were four or five of us when I was there which meant we out-numbered the artists as well as the audience. BaseNorth were welcoming and patient with all our questions, but I sensed it would all have had a little more meaning for them that morning if they had interacted with more of a local audience. There was fun to be had though, being upstaged on the lawn by two large sculptures and a glamour model being photographed by a pack of the paparazzi just feet from their tent.
One of the least visible projects on the New Life Berlin programme, it is hard to see what real impact Sandwhich Box and BaseNorth had in Berlin either conceptually or physically. Perhaps there was no special reason why Berlin was chosen by BaseNorth to make this work as it was not going to afford a directly empathic environment for the issue of urban regeneration. Maybe Berlin itself was not a good environment for this issue to be aired in, but the New Life Berlin Festival certainly was. In exposing the tensions in the relationship between the corporate and the cultural producer, in engaging in art as action that may change perception and make things happen and by addressing their work more to an international audience than the local one, it fitted the ethos of Wooloo Productions perfectly.
BaseNorth made a heartfelt if understated contribution to the Sandwich Box project and to New Life Berlin. They used the professional springboard opportunity that both projects offered to them in showcasing a pressing local issue to the global art community. Hopefully the issues BaseNorth raise will resonate and make some difference back home in the UK once the next batch of postcards are in the mail!
www.wooloo.org/sandwichbox
THE SANDWICH BOX project is formulated and conceived by Danish artist Lars Vilhelmsen in collaboration with Charlotte Mosen Jensen / Den lille Have
Clare Carswell
Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com
Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author.
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WEDNESDAY - JUNE 25, 2008 - 01:16:49 PM
I Think You Think. What Do You Think ?
Barbara Rosenthal
Existential Interact
2 – 6 pm outside KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr 69, Berlin
10 – 15 June 2008
One of the most persistently visionary artists, US conceptual artist Barbara Rosenthal knows what she thinks. This is not so surprising as she’s been self-examining in her work for four decades. Most recent in her long and kaleidoscopic career of multi-media art productions, is another testing visual performance work, ‘Existential Interact’. And it’s what we think that she’d now like to hear about.
Made for the New Life Berlin Festival in June 2008, Existential Interact finds Rosenthal performing street-side in Berlin’s smart Mitte area, outside the prestigious KW Institute for Contemporary Art. And when Rosenthal goes outside, she really goes outside! She has been ‘outside’ since high-school when, as alternative to cheerleader or gang-member, she fronted the school misfits and called them The Out Group.
Outside for Rosenthal in Berlin means that every afternoon she plonks herself right outside KW, and as close to the archway entrance to KW as it is possible to be. A chalked rectangle she has drawn on the road with her name scrawled in it, marks her arena for her planned cerebral high jinks. Rows of catalogues and DVD are arranged on the kerb, and weather permitting, her lap-top is there too, chained to a lamp-post and playing a show-reel of some of her early video works such as “How Much Does The Monkey Count”, “Society”, “Are You Jewish”.
Uninvited, but seemingly no more activist than that, Rosenthal is outside KW and approaching passersby playing out her existential interaction with anyone she can rope in, art or non-art audience will do just fine. Rosenthal knows what she is doing, and why. She has done this before. She grafted onto PERFORMA05, the first biennial of New Visual Art Performance in New York in 2005, and has performed outside several sanctioned art venues too. Milton Fletcher, writing in NYArts Magazine March/April 2006 in an article entitled ‘Taboo or Not Taboo’, describes Rosenthal’s live work at PERFORMA05 as ‘a savvy guerrilla art tactic potentially outrageous to Biennial sponsors. But just as important is the impulsive, non-processed act of performing itself’. I disagree with Milton. Based on what I see going on in Berlin Existential Interact is anything but impulsive and non-processed art making. Barbara Rosenthal is knowing, very knowing, and packs and plans down to the last detail. There is very little that is incidental or impulsive. Obsessive, neurotic perhaps, but impulsive, non-processed: no.
Spending time with Rosenthal whilst she was planning Existential Interact I observed just how methodical in her preparation and planning she is. To look that improvised you have to be. Rehearsed and poised to perform her verbal manoeuvres, Rosenthal presents at first as disarmingly dippy but is in fact totally locked on to her targets, we her public. Rosenthal’s performance technique – and that is surely what it is, is an under-cover one of impromptu chat, whilst she uses a variety of puppets, assumed voices and personae to lure us closer, her less than captive audience. Contact is made with us, a smile, a throw away line, we are tripping over her carefully casual street carpet of props. She is flirtatious, sashaying and fluttering, as her arm arcs upwards whilst she makes her pitch. At other times she is a lean, mean art toreador, her arm downward stabbing one of her printed slogan cards into us, like it or not. Yes, somewhere in this artful and swaggering offer of art freebies and self-penned caricatures Rosenthal has made the hit. Whaam!
The slogan cards that are shoved at her audience, like the familiar button pin badges that she is covered in, are standard props for Rosenthal and are the political looking media by which her self-revelatory aphorisms are passed on to us. The slogans ‘Life has a Life of its Own’, ‘This is Controversial’ and ‘Can I Play, Too?’ feature in a reprise of her 1987 piece ‘Seven Provocation Cards’. Extended for Berlin, Rosenthal has translated these slogans into German - although the online translation has thrown up some awkward interpretations and she is gratefully taking corrections and suggestions for improvement from Berliners who become embroiled in her show. These discussions about identity and meaning are pleasing to Rosenthal who is insistently direct in her communication and wants her slogan cards to do their job effectively wherever she is.
Some of the interactions, existential or otherwise, that Rosenthal has with the public in Berlin appear minimal and consist of nothing more than a smile, or a shriek from ‘Monkey’, one of her long-standing stooge puppets. Or there simply may be a meeting of eyes as the provocation cards are handed over. Others are conversations that go on and deep, a couple last over several days and lead to email exchanges. All these interactions might be anticipated, scripted and choreographed even if the unsuspecting audience don’t feel it. The public can perform too, if we like, and afterwards we perhaps realise that we have done so without meaning to. “The reality is the performance” Rosenthal explains to me when I ask her what it is she is doing.
Eventually Rosenthal finishes and we who have engaged with Existential Interact might leave clutching a card or two she has given us or a drawn caricature of ourselves. Parading somewhere between street theatre and eccentric evangelism, Existential Interact is all rather flummoxing and bewildering yet also utterly inspiring. We may well ponder our cards and drawings later on and wonder what it all meant but that is exactly what Rosenthal intends we should do. For Existential Interact is a direct interrogation of our beliefs and values about life and art and of our willingness not just to name them, but to act on them too. Hers are brazen guerrilla art tactics- a master class in them- and anyone who underestimates the skill and the refinement of Existential Interact is going to be left standing. The informed and courageous action we see on the street side is at the core of Barbara Rosenthal’s ethos for art making and living. It is her integrity that defines her almost obsessive demands of herself and of us for an individual, soul and psyche determining of what we do and why.
The lack of a wider audience has been an issue within the New Life Berlin Festival’s agenda of participation, intervention and social engagement. Several Open Dialogues writers have tried to address this in their articles on this blog. Sure, all the projects in New Life Berlin have attempted to address ideas and strategies for participation, they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t. Inevitably, some have done it better than others. But for me Rosenthal’s Existential Interact is one of only two projects in the festival that takes on the Berlin public face to face and asks what their involvement can be in art and what it can mean. Per Tresdalh’s Flash Job Campaign is the other, with its focus on interaction and location on the streets of Berlin. But 'participants' need to sign up to be in Flash Job Campaign and the work remains relatively hidden to a general public. In comparison, Existential Interact is more open and generous. Moreover, there is no signing up involved. Unmediated and wily in its slipping the curatorial leash, Rosenthal's is possibly the only work in the New Life Berlin Festival where the local audience outnumbers the other artists and writers who have in the main constituted this festival’s audience. Next time there may be very good reasons for making sure that Ms Rosenthal is on the inside.
www.wooloo.org/barbararosenthal
Clare Carswell
Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com
Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author.
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TUESDAY - JUNE 24, 2008 - 02:46:10 PM
NEW LIFE, NEW MAP, IMPRESSIONS FROM A NEW NATIVE
As the New Life Berlin Festival is now at a close, one of the lasting impressions is the way that my city (yes, being a 4-year resident, I now lay claim!) has been used by participant artists, some of whom have never seen Berlin before, as a platform for their work. New Life Berlin is most certainly situated here and in no other city; almost every project is grounded in a social, physical, political or historical aspect of Berlin. For this reason, this city was subject to the projections placed on it by visitors and residents. In creating and using maps of Berlin as the basis of many of the projects, we did indeed create a new Berlin map built of impressions, memories, fantasies, dreams, and fragments.
Some artists in New Life Berlin chose to physically engage with the Berlin streets. Gordon Sasaki’s ‘Movement,’ shown as part of Urban Space screenings, focused his camera only on the Berlin topography under his feet. And Marie Christine Katz (‘Road Kills and Other Casualties’ also of Urban Space) lay down in the street, waiting to see how Berliners’ reaction to her would reflect their experience of Berlin, how her unlikely act would be situated in this city. How would Berliners react differently to passersby’s in New York, or elsewhere? How would their reaction be situated in Berlin?
‘30 days of New Life Berlin’ looked at Berlin as a set of points of artistic attractions, hyper-linking points on an online map to descriptive writing based on a physical visit. The 30 days project called to mind that “art” might be in every cobblestone of a city, or, depending on your perspective, only housed in galleries. But the map was made by cartographers who came to Berlin from elsewhere—in other words, mapped by explorers and not natives—and so what we see is a map not fully integrated into the experience of living here in Berlin. In some sense, the foreignness of the 30 days cartographers gave a more objective view of what Berlin has to offer: a native’s sense of art in his/her own city may change vastly from year to year. A visitor, on the other hand, might not venture much further than the Auguststrasse or Brunnenstrasse gallery district, and never find the dilapidated building sites, the graffiti murals and other pieces of Berlin art that are off the beaten track—and likely to soon be destroyed.
Per Traasdahl’s ‘Flash Job Campaign’ was also tied directly to the Berlin map. On the first day, participant “Catalysts” were given a physical section of the map of the Neukölln district of Berlin. Like the 30 Days cartographers, Flash Job Campaign catalysts pounded the streets of the very piece of map they held in their hand, but with the mission of finding one time or ‘flash’ jobs for teenagers. Going into the project rather blindly, many participants and onlookers wondered what would be the real life result of physically walking those green and blue street lines of the map? Who would the catalysts encounter and how would they communicate with – in some cases- no German language skills? Despite the difficulties of “dropping” catalysts into the mix of Berlin, several ‘flash job’ matches were made between teenagers and employers. Two of these jobs, however, were outside the borders of Neukölln. But the magical aspect of the project was that the borders of Flash Job Campaign were more fluid than the “rules of the game,” rules that were initially delineated not only in terms of the map, but in terms of how catalysts had to improvise to make the jobs happen. And by letting these rules soften, and improvisation move in, the catalysts learned that the process was the art. The final product, of making a match and fulfilling a flash job, was the icing on the cake. As one of the participants said, “it wasn’t until I stopped concentrating on the word “job” that I actually found one.” It wasn’t until they let the map fly away that they saw what lay within it.
Ali&Cia’s “Eat the Wall” likewise wrestled with the physical borders of Berlin—though in this case, the choice of a wall reminds us of a relic that nevertheless still makes its mark. Using food as physical bricks, participants were invited to build a wall in between two rooms in the SCALA space on Friedrichstrasse. When visitors later arrived, we were forced to one side or the other based on our date of birth. Only by eating or dismantling the wall could we cross. Each room had a decidedly different energy—one was painted black and the lights were dimmed; in the other the walls were white and the light was almost oppressively bright. But we didn’t know the difference until some of us defected and came back to bring the news: “The other side … it’s much more communal, much more comfortable. Come over with me.” While the wall was an impressive architectural feat, and the process of eating it or taking the art away or ‘to-go’ was quite entertaining, I was struck with how Eat the Wall seemed to be the product of an outsider’s impression of Berlin. While the Berlin wall will be an idea permanently etched in collective memory, it lacks real meaning for those of us that live in Berlin today; those who cross freely from east to west on the U-bahn, and who see, in fact, that big development intends to take Berlin as a whole within the next ten years. The new digital O2 Loop billboard, for which a section of the “East Side Gallery” was dismantled, looms much higher than the wall ever did. Capitalism has indeed broken down borders.
What may have brought an experimental project like the New Life Berlin festival to Berlin is the fact that the Berlin Wall was here, and when it was dismantled it left a chaos and a lack of organized capitalism that made way for a multitude of experimental arts and performances spaces. This history is what explains the dilapidated “East Berlin” texture of the New Life shop itself, the fading signature Berlin posters of Nathan Peter’s ‘Eminent Domain’; the worn “beautiful ugly” that so many of us appreciate about this city. And just two blocks down from the New Life shop we see an empty lot which will apparently be turned into exclusive loft apartments. Its new developer advertises itself as “The Fine Art of Living—Moved by Diamona & Harwisch.”
I imagine that as artists we want somehow to hold on to the chaos of a freshly unified Berlin, because it gives us so much freedom. Yet, as the Art and Economics Group so clearly reminds us—we need someone to buy our art, we need festivals to raise our profile; we need people with money to recognize us. This is an endless struggle. We need the spaces- that are “not art” to be called art—something the 30 Days Cartographers make manifest- and for these spaces to stay bohemian, not simply turned into brand names and chain stores. Hopefully this “New Life Berlin” map that we have all created together will continue to hold in tender balance the imagined Berlin that brought us here in the first place.
Kathryn Fischer (aka Mad Kate) is a writer and performance artist currently making mischief in Berlin, Germany. www.alfabus.us
Please only reproduce this writing with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com
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MONDAY - JUNE 23, 2008 - 10:50:56 AM
MY MOTHER ALWAYS TOLD ME NOT TO EAT STANDING UP
ALI&CIA 'EAT THE WALL', PUBLIC CEREMONY June 15
Preparing the Wall. Photo (c) Mary Paterson
When I’m away from my native country, three factors interlink as an altered sensory terrain to adjust to and dabble in; the language, the weather and food. Recently, and as a visitor to the city, I was offered the pleasure of joining a group of artists, bakers and members of the public to indulge in the demolition of a 2m high wall of food bisecting the exhibition space at Scala Gallery, Berlin. The project, Eat the Wall, is one of the smaller of a series of large scale edible works by Ali&Cia, which engage non-artists in the creation of a work of art through cooking; a common everyday skill that defines cultural identities and showcases individuals’ creativity.
As Eat The Wall’s official Berlin baker says, there is a bread for every country, and bread has definitely been a staple in my time in Berlin. With delis on every street, freshly made sandwiches have been hard to avoid. And poppy seed pretzels, and loaves made with cheese or olives, and wraps filled with falafel. As a common cultural signifier, bread has a unifying quality, breaking bread being an ancient symbolic act of friendship. Appropriate then, that Ali&Cia sought a sponsor baker who specialises in traditional German loaves to provide sturdy crusty support for this edible icon. However, considering that the event largely caters for a guest list of international artists, injecting sense of local heritage seems a little superficial.
Though Ali&Cia’s past works show an intention to involve the local community, here in Berlin this type of engagement has been relatively narrow - largely due to time and funding restrictions. Instead, Ali&Cia have placed more focus on the individual and the incitement of a convivial communal act of social exchange; the project activates individual participation so simply- all you have to do is like food and not have just finished a three course meal before coming! The project is hard to position in the contemporary art canon; the team excitedly uses the term ’Eat-Art’, which is seemingly a messy mixing bowl of social, relational and performance based practice. Perhaps it is significant that the team, coming from a range of academic backgrounds, only began referring to themselves as artists relatively recently, since they were invited to perform their work within an art context. With current art practices engaging in such a wide range of fields, it fits that specialists from other fields will cross the borders that define contemporary art practice, blurring them further and making them more difficult to define by us writers (if that’s what we really are).
Relying on the participation of individuals to contribute material is a risk, which might explain the team’s need for a sponsor baker - just in case people don’t bring enough, or not enough people come. This detracts from the collaboration-centred act of building the wall and eating it together and questions how much participants can be expected to offer through short term engagement in fleeting projects. Happily though, the gallery hosted a large crowd, as is so often the case when free food, or free anything is available. Separating their guests into two groups according to odd and even birthdates, the team instilled a sense of ceremony and kept their guests’ focus on the wall that came between them. I arrived hungry, and stood with my fellow ‘odd numbered’ friends at the front of the crowd.
Looking at the wall now, I was disappointed at the use of orderly arranged Tupperware tubs of food as the main structural component; I had wanted to see spoons gouging out chunks of the wall to reveal full mouthed participants on the other side, looking back through sponge cake window frames. Admittedly, I could not attend the building session and so I lacked a sense of pride at its completion that others had gained through this shared creative act, and I held back criticism, hoping that the ceremonious toppling of the wall would prove more interesting.
As an unclear and anti-climactic start, traditional loaves were passed back to the table, followed by tubs of various nibbles. This was not the fun hands-on approach I had expected, and neither was it an attempt at civilised dining - the table was far too small and the room too dark. Instead, we lingered in the middle-ground, and memories of party buffets came flooding back; the anti-social experience of introducing yourself to another guest whilst keeping one eye on their hand, willing it not to pick up the last smoked salmon and cream cheese melba toast. Crisps next to carrot sticks and salsa dips and a dollop of the hot dish on the side - and not even that variety was available here; apart from the occasional interesting Turkish snack, for the most part the wall consisted of bread and biscuits. I clutched my dry crust and tub of olives, was offered a piece of cake, then ate an opportunist fork-full of potato salad. Perhaps my traditional side is showing through, but I found myself wanting to sit down with real cutlery and make conversation.
The satisfaction of the wall as a meal may seem trivial, and the symbolic act of breaking its division in a convivial atmosphere more important. But Ali&Cia placed great significance on the actual act of eating, and for this to occur it’s important that the food is appetising. Had the wall not been dismantled by the team and placed on tables for the guests to eat, I doubt that the whole structure would have come down. (Especially considering the amount of leftovers there were - the kind that have been picked at. The guests were encouraged to take these morsels home, and I trust in good faith that the rest were given to homeless shelters.) A convivial atmosphere was also interrupted by the moody and at times imposing live music, presumably selected to add an obscure dramatic air to the event.
Over the course of the evening my most genuine sense of performing a symbolic act came from breaking the rules and crossing the border to the other side of the wall (through the hallway, not through the wall) where I found the familiar faces of more of my peers, privileged to be in a much lighter space and paying less attention to the game of destruction than to their conversation. Being in a room with food, drink and good company can rarely be a bad thing, but bringing together a group of artists to knowingly demonstrate the unifying potential of social interaction and to light-heartedly role-play a significant political act, made for a confused and quite messy artistic experience. When the giddiness of the sugar intake subsided, I found myself stuffed, underwhelmed and laden with even more bread.
Charlotte A Morgan
Charlotte A. Morgan is an artist and writer currently co-developing and curating Transit Projects, a mobile project space based in Sheffield UK and online. charlotte.anne.morgan@googlemail.com
Please only reproduce this text with permission from the author and Open Dialogues. opendialogues@gmail.com
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SATURDAY - JUNE 21, 2008 - 09:23:59 AM
INTERVIEW- NATHAN PETER
US artist Nathan Peter was interviewed by Open Dialogues writer Clare Carswell, in Choriner Strasse, Berlin on Wednesday 11th June 2008. He was in the process of de-installing the large wall-based work ‘Eminent Domain’ that he had made for the New Life Berlin Festival. www.wooloo.org/eminentdomain
Photo: Eminent Domain by Nathan Peter, photographer Andreas Bastiansen, courtesy Wooloo Productions.
Clare Carswell (CC) : What is your view of critical writing in relation to your artistic practice ?
Nathan Peter (NP) : I want critical writing to be a true assessment of my work. If it only goes so far, and is mere description, that is not of interest to me. The descriptive tells people what is going on as opposed to offering a more theoretical text such as those in Art Forum. When I read critique I look for insights beyond the obvious and descriptive and surface interpretation. I hear a lot of artists say that they don’t read reviews and maybe the artist is not part of the audience that the writer has in mind. But there is a curiosity to read what is written about you – like going to a fortune teller – did they pick up on things?
CC : You received a great deal of attention in the first week of the New Life Berlin festival from the Open Dialogues writers. A total of three exclusive reviews of Eminent Domain, as well as extensive mentions of it in three others have appeared on the Open Dialogues blog. Have you read them?
NP : The response from the Open Dialogues writers has been impressive and I’ve never experienced that amount of attention to my work in such a short time. I have had good response from critics before, but it is often verbal and spread over a longer period, say of six weeks of exhibition or so.
NP: It is rare, too, to get the opportunity to talk with a writer and influence the text that is to be written about you. I did meet several of the Open Dialogues writers at the opening party and in the days after it and I have read through their reviews. Some are a general summation of the opening of the New Life Berlin festival and descriptions of the visuals in Eminent Domain, these are of less interest to me.
With the Open Dialogues writing the format being used is the blog. I wonder if reading critical writing on a blog is different to reading concrete text in a magazine ? I think that the informality of it does affect the style of the writing. I have a feeling too that the writers picked up the press release by Carson Chan that was available that night with my work, which was contextualising my work, and used this as a legitimised departure point for their writing. I wonder now if I should have put that text next to my work at all. The battle was how formal to make it. I wonder if that text hadn’t been there if the other writing would have been more of a discovery for me. Carson Chan has a lot of knowledge about my work, he knows the history of my ideas and of my time here in Berlin, so he has a more informed angle on my work.
CC : Does this give Chan’s writing more weight and resonance for you ?
NP : Yes, in some ways it does. Carson and I have spent a lot of time talking and this shows in his writing, whereas the Open Dialogues writing on the blog shows the difference between those I’ve spent time with and those I haven’t.
CC : Which of the Open Dialogue pieces are you are referring to ?
NP : The piece by Heiko Schmid is very good, he is living here in Berlin and it shows. I am also interested in the piece by Eliza Tan and how she took a personal approach to my work and to Berlin. She wrote about her initial response to my work and then how as she experienced Berlin, that she picked up on imagery in the city and this helped her interpret my work. So it was the experience of it she wrote about rather than relying on a more formal framework. Others fell short of going beyond description and of offering something insightful and critical. I am beyond having my feelings hurt, I am used to receiving criticism and welcome it. Heiko’s piece worked because he brought in his familiar relationship to Berlin and Eliza her personal experience of it too. So criticism doesn’t have to take a third party objective stance. Some of the writing was very bland. Equally, Carali McCall said of Eminent Domain, that it is like ‘a painters attempt at installation’ which was a negative but an interesting one. If my installation is seen as a failure it at least reflects the challenge to the painter in architecture that has existed since cave painting and through to ceiling painting. I am curious about this description as a painter and would like to know more of what she meant by that.
CC : Would you contact the writer to ask her ?
NP : Probably not. To have a dialogue the artist doesn’t always need to be an active participant. But there needs to be a theoretical to and fro. A little criticism is no bad thing. We have all been through art school so are used to legitimising our work.
CC : What art journals do you read ?
NP : I read Texte Zur Kunst. It’s a monthly written in German but three quarters of it is in English. The last issue decided to focus on critical writing. I used to read Tate Magazine and Modern Painters. Tate is now more of a fashion magazine. I like collections of writing such as the conversations of Hans Ulrich Olbrist. It is fascinating how he creates dialogue, is so familiar with the artist and their practice and asks really insightful questions.
CC : How can critical writing best reflect your work back to you ?
NP : There is a real opportunity for a writer to gain some intimacy with my work. They have to bring something different to the writing and to the work. For example you can take historical art criticism and put it in the forefront, take the perspective of a distanced glance and ask how it is contextualised in contemporary discourse. The art critics role is not to give a flattering description of the work. It is of course fantastic to read a flattering review but that is what catalogues and public relations are for.
CC : What is it that you want writing on your work to tell you ?
NP : I want to be told something I didn’t know. Both as a viewer of my work but mainly as artist.
CC : Does that process go to substantiate your potential role as a more objective viewer of your work ?
NP : Yes definitely. As an artist I am so wrapped up in the process that it feels impossible to step back and question. The best critic of my work is my wife, if that isn’t too obvious!
CC : Do you visit exhibitions ?
NP : I don’t feel I have to make the effort any more to see everything that is going on. I invest in my own studio practice. So I don’t go to all the art shows and biennales. To see my work in relation to a grander scheme though can be beneficial. For example when I came across Gordon Matta Clark’s work I hadn’t known of him before despite my formal art education. He is now a big influence for me.
CC : Are there other artists who influence you ?
NP : Sigmar Polke, Cy Twombly. I love 60s and 70s Polke but also recently, in 2007, I saw and loved his abstract paintings.
CC : Do you know that a retrospective of Cy Twombly opens this month at Tate Modern?
NP : That will be worth making a trip for !
...................................................OFF THE RECORD........................................
At this point I have stopped documenting our conversation as Nathan and I began to talk more about his approach to painting and how this translated into his installed work Eminent Domain at Choriner Strasse. He spoke with such animation and passion about his painting and his studio practice, and the reasons why the outcome for New Life Berlin was not more painterly, that I realised that in order to make better sense of Eminent Domain it was essential that I saw his paintings. We arranged there and then for me to go visit him the next morning in his studio in Kreuzberg. That conversation is the basis for a longer profile piece that I am writing on Nathan Peter and his work for later publication. (Clare Carswell)
Clare Carswell is an interdisciplinary artist currently working with performative drawing and unmediated actions in the public domain. She is a freelance writer, published in the UK regional press and Interface online. She is based in Oxford UK. www.clarecarswell.com
Please only reproduce this text with permission from opendialogues@gmail.com and the author.
